> Cover grid infrastructure costs. We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through increases to our monthly electricity charges. This includes the shares of these costs that would otherwise be passed onto consumers.

This is great, but do they have an actual example of something that would have been passed on to consumers? Or is it just a hypothetical?

In the location I’m familiar with, large infrastructure projects have to pay their own interconnection costs. Utilities are diverse across the country so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are differences, but in general I doubt there are many situations where utilities were going to raise consumer’s monthly rates specifically to connect some large commercial infrastructure.

Maybe someone more familiar with these locations can provide more details, but I think this public promise is rather easy to make.

North Carolina passed Senate Bill 266, changing how utilities can recover costs for projects under construction amid rising energy demand, particularly from data centers. Now Duke Energy wants a double digit price rate increase: https://starw1.ncuc.gov/NCUC/ViewFile.aspx?Id=0ac12377-99be-...

There's a huge diversity of pricing and regulatory schemes across the US. I think you skepticism is well placed in general, because where I live in California the price increase has been almost entirely from bad grid maintenance policies of years past but people come up with random other excuses.

However there are some examples where increased demand by one sector leads to higher prices for everyone. The PJM electricity market has a capacity market, where generators get compensated for being able to promise the ability to deliver electricity on demand. When demand goes up, prices increase in the capacity market, and those prices get charged to everyone. In the last auction, prices were sky high, which leads to higher electricity prices for everyone:

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-interconnection-capacit...

A lot of electricity markets in other places allow procurement processes where increased costs to meet demand get passed to all consumers equally. If these places were actually using IRPs that had up to date pricing, adding new capacity from renewables and storage would lower prices, but instead many utilities go with what they know, gas generators, which are in short supply and coming in at very high prices.

And the cost of the grid is high everywhere. As renewables and storage drive down electricity generation prices, the grid will come to be a larger and larger percentage of electricity costs. Interconnection is just one bit of the cost, transmission needs to be upgraded all around as overall demand grows. We've gone through a few decades of stagnant to lessening electricity demand, and utilities are hungry to do very expensive grid projects because they get a guaranteed rate of return on grid expansion in most parts of the country.

Putting aside interconnection costs, when electricity is auctioned increased demand can increase wholesale prices for everyone.

Georgia power already has a demand scaled recovery charge addition to bills that increases prices for residential customers regardless of where the demand originates. It used to be only applied occasionally during the summer. Now they've adjusted the peak / off-peak rates to be what it used to be plus the demand recovery, and now the demand recovery is additional and just applies pretty much all the time.

Generally most distribution costs are socialized starting with the REA and such. My block needed a new transformer a few weeks ago and it will be paid for by every customer of that utility.